I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” the villain played by Rutger Hauer reminisces at the end of the film Blade Runner after hauling Harrison Ford’s character on to a roof top and sparing his life. “People” is the operative word since Roy Batty is not a person but an android who escapes to earth from a space colony and takes revenge on the Tyrell Corporation, his creator.

The causes and consequences of the long-running inflation of profits by Toshiba reflect some uniquely Japanese cultural norms. So, inevitably, did the 2011 scandal at Olympus , where successive leaders covered up accounting manipulation.

Hisao Tanaka, Toshiba’s chief executive, gave a 15-second bow on Tuesday as he resigned over a $1.2bn accounting scandal. Mr Tanaka and seven other executives took responsibility for deceptions that started in 2008. Taro Aso, Japan’s finance minister, warned that this could “lose the market’s trust”.

Imagine a business with a base of middle-class customers in the richest nations, a fervent new following in the world’s fastest-growing Asian economies, loyal corporate backers, and a new global television showcase, championed by personable young stars. Are you in?

About a decade ago, Bobby Kotick, chief executive of the video games company Activision Blizzard, flew to Kyoto to visit Nintendo. He was shown to a room with a television on which was displayed an image of a pond with bubbles floating to the surface. Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president, handed him a games controller called a wand and guided his hand to cast a virtual fishing line.

Habitual lateness, mild abuse of the corporate credit card, a little grousing by outgoing employees about low pay or overwork: the day to day dysfunctions of many large businesses. But could these be warning signals of a coming collapse in corporate culture or an imminent scandal? If so, how should companies detect and act on them?

Everywhere one ventures in cities, skyscrapers are being built or planned. Even Paris is getting one. The French capital last week backed plans for a 180-metre high triangular tower by Herzog & de Meuron of Switzerland, its first in four decades.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s choice of Kirill Petrenko as its next chief conductor, succeeding Sir Simon Rattle, is less remarkable than the fact it made a decision at all. The 124-member orchestra, one of the world’s most democratic musical ventures, failed to do so in May despite 11 hours of debate and several ballots.

When Deutsche Bank named John Cryan as its new chief executive three weeks ago, the commentary had an insidious subtext. He has “an enormous brain”, one friend told the FT. “Very thoughtful,” said a former colleague. Ominously for Mr Cryan, these comments echoed those made about Vikram Pandit when he unexpectedly stepped down as Citigroup’s CEO in 2012. He was “too cerebral”, said critics of the Citi boss.

My first — and probably still my favourite — factory visit was to London Rubber Company’s Durex condom plant in Chingford, London. Mind you, the sight of a latex sheath being test-inflated to a metre or more in length does tend to stick in the memory.

When the smartest, if not the most literate, guys in the room see “an opportunity to leverage our competencies in technology and risk management to capture this opportunity at accretive returns”, beware. Goldman Sachs plans to launch what was once called a bank, then a peer-to-peer lending platform, and now a “marketplace lender”.

As if the luxury goods industry were not already in a fragile mood, Johann Rupert, chairman of Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, gave it more to worry about this week. He warned of the damage it faces from growing wealth inequality, and resentment among the have-nots of those who flaunt luxury watches and jewellery.

Frederick Winslow Taylor is the ghost in the room at debates about new ways of monitoring staff. As the pioneer of “scientific management”, he was the man with a clipboard and stopwatch timing factory workers at the turn of the last century.

If the worst happens, there is one comfort: this is the best time in history to contract cancer. You stand a better chance than ever before of being cured or of living a longer life after less unpleasant treatment. There is a possible side-effect to consider, though: financial ruin.

I blame Sebastian Junger. The success of The Perfect Storm, the journalist’s 1997 book about a doomed fishing boat gave embattled corporate titans the perfect metaphor for what went wrong on their watch.

Imagine if the attorney-general of Switzerland asked the New York Police Department to drive up Park Avenue and arrest several senior officials of Major League Baseball. The cops would probably do it, if the extradition charges were drawn up correctly, but one or two New Yorkers might demand to know what business it was of the Swiss to interfere in a traditional American pastime.

“The managers have much pleasure in stating that the immense numbers who have travelled under their arrangements have been conducted in perfect safety — indeed in the history of the Midland Lines, no accident, attended with personal injury, has ever happened to an Excursion Train. In conducting the extraordinary traffic of this Great Occasion, the first object is to ensure safety, and that object has hitherto been most happily achieved.” (Thomas Cook poster for an 1851 trip to the Great Exhibition.)

Coming to San Francisco for the first time in a few years brings home how much it has been transformed. Whatever you call what is happening — a boom, a bubble or a flood of money into what was known as new technology before the “new” became redundant — has augmented the city’s reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of 'All That Glitters', an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.

Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.

Emma Jacobs is a features writer for the FT, with a particular focus on Business Life. She explores workplace trends, business culture and entrepreneurship and is one of the paper's leading interviewers.

Adam Jones is editor of Business Life, home to the FT's coverage of management, entrepreneurship and working life.

Lucy Kellaway is an Associate Editor and management columnist of the FT. For the past 15 years her weekly Monday column has poked fun at management fads and jargon and celebrated the ups and downs of office life.

Ravi Mattu is the deputy editor of the FT Weekend Magazine and a former editor of Business Life. He writes about management, technology, entrepreneurship andinnovation.

Michael Skapinker is an assistant editor and editor of the FT’s special reports. A former management editor of the FT, his column on Business and Society appears every Thursday.